From Burnout to Breakthrough: Amanda Goetz’s 5 C Framework

We underestimate what we can do in a year and overestimate what we can do in a day. But if somebody would have met me two years ago when I'm just clicking send on that first newsletter, there is no way I would have believed that I would have a book coming out. Be making the money I'm making, be talking to the people. So just believe that you can do it. And you're already in an amazing community right now with the Mighty Networks crew.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Creator Summit. Thank you for being here. So excited about what we've got in store for you you for the next little bit. And we're get started with our first session because we've got so much to get into today. So welcoming Amanda up to the stage. Amanda, how are you?

Hey. I'm good. Excited to be here.

Excited for you to be here. First of all, you're on family vacation right now, and I just want to say thank you for calling in even from vacation. This is part of why I love the work that we do, is that you knew how important it was to be able to talk to all these folks at the Creator Summit, that you even made the space and time to do that while you're on a family vacation. So thanks for calling on your vacation today.

Yeah, we'll see if kids can stay building Legos downstairs for an hour. So fingers crossed, everyone.

Yeah. So tell me this really quick. I love to just give me, like, the 32nd version of Amanda. The the thing that you and I have in common that I actually really love here is we're both from small town Midwest, but, like, you've done so much in your career. So for those who don't know, you, give us just the 30 seconds of what we need to know about Amanda.

Okay. And I just got sunscreen in my eye, everyone, because I was on the lake earlier. So if you see me crying, it's not that I'm emotional, it's that my sunscreen's in my eye. Okay, 32nd version. So I started my career at Ernst and Young, big four accounting firm in the Midwest, moved to New York City, and started managing a celebrity wedding planner's personal brand. So reality tv, licensing deals, all of those things. And that was really my first front row seat into what it looks like to have the power of a personal brand. And from there, I actually launched my first startup, which was a tech company in the wedding space. That took me to the knot, where I led marketing for five and a half years. Then I started my next startup, which was a CPG business. It was a supplement business in the wellness space. And built that because of community. And I realized the power of community. I didn't spend a dollar in paid marketing. We had hundreds and hundreds. And then it led to thousands of people talking about our products, selling our products, and that led to me selling that company in 2023. So the power of both personal brand plus community, and that led me to starting my own community and going all in on becoming a creator, which this.

Is a pretty new journey. Just in the last couple of years, you've started doing your own personal brand, which has been really fun. I've kind of had like a behind the scenes watching you grow everything. And the really cool thing is you had a book coming out this fall. So tell us a little bit about that book that's coming out because I think that's a jumping off point for us to talk about what we want to talk about today.

Yeah, well, I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, you became a creator so you could become an author. And really my creator journey started with just I wanted to become a better writer. And I started a newsletter and grew that. That'll cross a hundred thousand subscribers. And throughout that process of writing long form, I realized how much I loved it and how much words have an impact. And so that got me a book deal. So really having a year of newsletters to show an agent and show a publisher gave me the opportunity to get a book deal. And so my first book is coming out. It's called Toxic Grit, how to have it all and actually love what you have. And it's this struggle that a lot of ambitious people feel, which is, how do I keep being ambitious while still feeling contentment with what I have now?

Yeah, that's the jumping off point that I'd love to have for this conversation because I think that's. I've seen Kit put together a survey a couple years ago and it said something like 70% of all creators are feeling burnt out. And in a world where AI now exists in a pretty significant way, where we're being told that we have to post every single day, maybe multiple times a day, it's just like there's so much going on. And if you have any level of ambition, burnout is rampant in this space and in a lot of spaces. So talk to me about why or how you really created a scenario for yourself where you could be a. I mean, a single mom of three kids, you could be a CMO fractionally. And starting this newsletter and Writing a book without everything burning to the ground and falling apart.

The first thing I had to get really, really clear on is the common traps we all fall into. So I'll talk about two versus the significance trap. Most people think something is, is more significant than it actually is, right? Like, we think that responding to this email within these few minutes is going to make or break our business. But really 20% of the work gets 80% of the results. And so throughout my journey of being a single mom and building businesses and now having a portfolio career and multiple revenue streams, it's really important to get very clear on what's actually driving revenue and moving the business forward and cut out kind of the rest of the frivolous stuff, which I think is really hard because when we're ambitious people, we strive for perfectionism and to do things to full completion. It's like, oh, I must respond to every email today. No, you don't. And so significance trap is kind of the first one and the second one is urgency trap. Most things aren't as urgent as we think that they are. So where does that come from? Why do we feel the need to respond to somebody immediately on Slack, etc. Those are all deeper things that, you know, oh, I got a. People, please. I've got to make sure that they see my value. They see that I'm on, I'm here, I'm doing it. But the more I understood that the real results were coming when I shielded myself from those two traps, that's kind of like that moved my business in a whole new direction. So that's kind of number one. And then the second thing I would say, I really understand this concept of, I call it the tte, the time to expertise when you start something new. Let's use building a community, right? Say you're going to launch a community to figure out what that community is going to be, how you're going to operationalize it, how you're going to show up. That takes three to six months for you to. What normally takes. Like in the beginning, like when I was first writing my newsletter, every issue took around 8 to 10 hours, right? Like from ideating it to like researching to see which research, like Neuropsych, you know, anything I'm trying to pull in data research and then edit it, program it. Like, all of that took time, but over time that got faster and faster and faster. So if you think about, let's say you're trying to do four projects at once and they're all in those early stages taking 10 hours, you're going to move them forward so slow. But if you focus on one and say, okay, I'm going to get better at it. I'm going to build the efficiencies. A newsletter. I can write a newsletter now in an hour, and I can do a whole month's worth in a few hours. So give yourself the time to become an expert and operationalize and learn what's not, what is important, what isn't important, because you don't know in the beginning where your energy is going to be, where that 8020 rule is. And I think so many people, when they become a creator, they're operating really out of a place of, like, fear. I've got to be everywhere because I got to make money, which is so real. And I felt that when I first started. But figure out what's going to keep the lights on. Like, what do you need to do to pay the bills? And then allow yourself to focus and finish on one project at a time so that you can really become an expert at that thing.

That's really good. Time to expertise. I see two things happen here. One is people try to do five or six or seven things all at once, and you never become proficient at any one thing. How do you find the balance of, okay, like, if I do need to, like, have this be something that's making me money, but also, I know there's three to six months, like, talk to me about the give and take a little bit here, because I've seen people try too many things and then nothing works. And I've seen people get distracted by, you know, like, having to have, like, a great example of this is somebody who's wanting to write a newsletter, but then they do service work on the side in the interim, and then two years later, they're still only doing service work. And they've never put the focus that it really takes to become an expert at something. Talk to me about the give and take of those two things a little bit.

So I have a concept called offense and defense, right? Offenses. I was a basketball player my whole life, so offenses. I have the ball. I'm moving my bigger goals forward. Defenses, all right, I got to work for others. I got to do other things to pay the bills. If you can carve out two hours a day to be on offense and you focus on that 20% of work, that's going to get 80% of the results. That's 10 hours of focused work a week that most people can't do in a month. So if I wake up every day, guard two hours. And then, yeah, maybe in the beginning I, like, I was still doing a lot of fractional CMO work to keep the lights on and to pay my bills. But every morning for two hours, I was focused on that thing for that quarter. That was the new project that I was becoming proficient in, becoming an expert in. I think we, we allow things to fill up the time. We allow it. So if you sit down at your computer and you're like, okay, I got eight hours today. I. It's funny because I can ab test this. I have my kids half of the time, the weeks that I have my kids, I am more productive at work. And what I've learned is that I have, I think, oh, I have all day to get this thing done. And then I let it take all day. When they always say, like, if you want something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. Like when I don't have as much time. So you have to. When you become a solopreneur and a creator, you have to be that forcing function for yourself to say, all right, these are my two hours. I'm on offense. These are the things I'm working on because it's moving my longer term goals forward. And then the rest of the day can be on defense. I'm working for other people, I'm still paying the bills, et cetera, but those two hours will have meaningful results.

Yeah. And I always say, like, put those two hours at the beginning of your day, not the end of your day, because you want to give your best and highest energy. It's like first fruits idea or first principles idea, which is like, I'm giving my best energy, my best attention to that thing. Right, right. First in the morning. Next question here. How do I know what the thing is that I should focus on? Because there's another thing that I, another trap that I see people fall into all the time where it's like they've been focusing on a thing for six to nine months and there's no momentum, there's no movement, it's not working and it may never work. How do you decide a what I should be prioritizing in that two hours a day and then when to keep going and when to give up.

I work in quarters at a time and that's. I say, okay, for this quarter, I'm going to launch a course. Okay. And I'm going to learn what it means to be the best at launching a course. What I find with most people is they spend so much energy asking is this the right thing, that that energy is now going out and you're constantly questioning like every move, right? So for a quarter I am launching a course and then at the end of the quarter I have a retro with myself to say, okay, what, what results did this have? Am I going to be a course creator? Did this, did the level of effort match the level of impact, both impact on people? Did it really get the impact of that I wanted with the words and the teaching, did it have the impact on my business? And then I ask myself, like, if I would have used this time to do anything else, like how, you know, what would be different? And then I might say, wow, okay, if I do X, Y, Z, maybe next quarter I stick with this course and I build the, the recurring revenue streams. I build into like funnel optimization and nurturing tracks. Okay, I believe that I can maybe build another five to six figures of revenue if I focus there. Or I say, holy crap, I spent so much time, I made, you know, $20,000 on this launch. I could have focused on these two things and made 50,000. I'm going to pivot. But the point is, I think the thing you're hearing me say is a clear operating rhythm to say, I'm going to focus on this. I'm not going to look at anything else. I'm here. This is the choice I made for this quarter. And I think a lot of this comes from working at big companies because when you have thousands of employees, you can't be like on a random Tuesday, oh, maybe we should do this other thing because you've got thousands of people working on the thing you said two weeks ago, you can't, you can't quickly pivot the Titanic. So I think about that for myself, even just as a one person show, I can't. I have to stay focused on the thing I said was important and trust that I made that decision with enough data and experience and like sounding board of community to say, yeah, this feels like the right next step in my flywheel and my creator journey and here's all the reasons why. And stay focused with blinders to not say, well, maybe if I do this, maybe that partnership could be cool. This could be fun. Yeah, that's a not right now. Put it in a parking lot and revisit it at the end of the quarter.

Yep. Babs just said you can't quickly pivot the Titanic, which is very true. I love that you're doing this in the three month rhythms. That's really great. So we're not going years of wasted time. But we're also staying really committed to become excellent and proficient at certain things. So I love, love, love that rhythm. I'm curious about this question. So the significance trap. How do I know what is significant and what's insignificant? How do I decide between those things? Like you mentioned the 80, 20 principle here. How do I know what's the 20 that I should be focusing on versus the 80 that I should maybe put into the defense category.

I'm going to give you a very clear visual. Say you make a graph, 4 quadrant check chart, level of effort, level of impact. Just back of the napkin math. If you say I could launch a new course that is extremely high effort and potentially middle impact. And, and you just keep going. And, and I, I firmly believe that you should always allow for your brain to have ideas. Ideas are great, even if they're crazy. I'm going to, you know, pitch this media company to be their face of whatever. Like whatever it is, put it into an ideal, an idealist. I have an ideation station is what I call it. And it's like, okay, whenever I have an idea, I put it there. Then you go through and say, what's the level of impact of doing this to my business? If it succeeds, what's the level of effort? And start to plot it on the graph. And after that you're going to start to say, okay, based on everything I've got going on for the next quarter, how much effort do I have in my two hours a day? What do I think I want to focus on for this quarter? And you can look at it, you can start to see how they stack up and then you pick the two. Maybe it's two things and you say, okay, I'm going to grow my newsletter. Because I believe that that is going to. I started this thing, it didn't really take off, but I believe that if I focus for a quarter, it could have a pretty big impact on my roadmap. Because, you know, a newsletter can drive community members, it can drive other things, sponsorships, et cetera. Okay, I launched it, but then I didn't focus on growing it. So that becomes your objective for the next quarter and you're just weighing everything. And I think the thing I want to leave people with, they took nothing else away, is that there are no right answers. It's choosing the best one for you and then going 100% on that and not looking around questioning if it was the right one. Waiting until that three month mark to say, huh, I put everything into this. Where am I At where did it get me?

I think that's super huge. I have another framework that I call the myth of leadership, which is I don't know what I'm doing, and I think I'm the only one. And the reality is, most leaders who I've met or most people that I've looked up to, it's like, they don't know any more than I know. What they do, though, is that they know that they have everything that they need right now to take the next right step. And it's kind of like, next right step, next right step, next right step. They stop looking external for all of the answers and realize that you actually have everything that you need to get going. And it's just the next right step. And it's been so funny to me, every time I, like, build somebody up on a pedestal of my mind and I get to meet them, I'm like, oh, they're making it up as they go, too. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Okay. Or they're, like, looking at somebody else and reverse engineering.

They're.

They don't have anything that I don't have. Um, and I think that's one of the biggest myths that people believe into.

Decision making is all about two things. Giving yourself the period of time to collect as much data as you need to make a good decision, and then setting a timeline on when you're going to make the decision. Because so many people. What's the Lorne Michaels SNL thing? You know, the show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 11:30 or whatever. It's like, that's real. When. When you are a solopreneur and a creator and a community builder, the show is not going to go on when it's ready. You have to allow yourself enough time to say, do I have enough information to make the best decision? Okay. This is the best decision I'm making with this information. I'm trusting it, and I'm making it, and we're moving forward. And then the rest of your work is making it the best decision for you or. Or giving yourself this operating rhythm to reevaluate that decision in three months.

Yeah, I love that. Okay. The second trap is the urgency trap. As a recovering, this is like. This can be a Darrell therapy session. So as a recovery, as a recovering, everything is urgent all of the time. Like, talk to me about this. This trap a little bit more because, uh, I think that it's like, I've got to. I'VE got to pop here. I've got to respond here. I've got this, this, this, this, this. I feel like I. I sometimes feel like a psycho where I'm just, like, moving from urgent thing to urgent thing. And I think what I'm realizing is if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. Um, but talk to me about this trap a little bit more.

If we picture ourselves like. Picture like a graph, and you start working on something, and then something disrupts you, and then you go back to working on it, and then something disrupts you, the amount of time that it took to do that thing is now, like, this big. Whereas if you would have focused and finished did that thing and then move to the other thing, people think that they can multitask. It's been proven that we are actually just rapidly switching brains back and forth. And the amount of lost efficiency when we have to go back, it's like, oh, okay, I'm doing this deck. Oh, wait, there's a slack message. Oh, wait, there's an email. Oh, my. My partner texted me, oh, this. Oh, this. Every time we go back to that deck to create it, our brain has to get back into the mindset. And so we are actually taxing our brain. So there's two things here. We're taxing our brain, which means we become more cognitively tired faster. And then the second thing is it's taking longer to stay in that flow and to get back into that flow. So if we just think about how do we protect our brain and optimize it for most efficiency throughout the day? Because that's. That's what I'm constant. I'm trying to save it from cognitive efficiency. You could say, I'm going to work on this deck for one hour, then I'm going to check my email for 10 minutes, then I'm going to check Slack for 10 minutes. And then in, you know, 80 minutes, you've done something that I bet would have probably taken three hours had you kept bouncing around. So there's this phrase that actually I worked for this guy, and he was the president of the company, and he would say, focus and finish. Just focus and finish on the thing that's in front of you, and then switch to the next thing and give it 100%, because when you're giving something half attention, you're going to get half results. So I think about this both in work and life. If I'm here doing this, I'm here 100%, and then I'm going to shut it down and switch to the next thing. And I won't feel guilty that I didn't give you guys 100%, because I did. And then my kids get 100% when I'm there. So I just think this, this concept of focus and finish goes so much more. Even beyond like letting Slack messages and email bombard you, but really protecting the thing that's in front of you because it deserves your attention and also protecting your brain from the inefficiencies and the overwhelm you're allowing, which is just making you more tired throughout the day. So I'm like, I want to, I want to be going throughout the day. So how do I protect it?

That's good. Okay. I love the theory of that. What does the actual practice look like? How do I stop? Like, I think so. There's a lot of, a lot happening in the chat over here and I think this is resonating with a lot of people. So I love the theory and the theory is really great. But like, how do I create the discipline for this or how do I actually do this?

So let's. I'm going to ask you some questions. We'll do like a little live. Okay, so when you sit down, do you have a project in mind that you're sitting down to work on?

Almost never.

Okay, so what I'm. What I want everyone to do tonight, just practice, try it and see if it works. Okay, you're going to pick one thing that you need, you know, you need to move forward and you're going to write it on a post it note. You're going to put it on your desk. Then you're going to close out of every tab on your computer. Yes, I'm saying it. You're going to close out of every freaking tab and you're going to pull up the thing that is related. So say you're going to write a newsletter. You're going to have a Word document. You're going to put the title of the newsletter or the subject that you're going to write about. Okay, maybe it's. You're going to think about building a community and you want to sit down and actually talk about community strategy or you're working on growing your community, put it on a post it note. Open up the thing that you need close out of everything else. Now tomorrow morning when you wake up, before you check email, before you check slack, I want you to just set a timer for one hour. Work on that thing. And if you do nothing else tomorrow, you moved that thing forward an hour. And guess what? Those slack messages and emails are still going to be there waiting for you. One hour won't significantly deter anyone. Think about how long it takes for somebody to respond to you. Sometimes it's like people are busy, but the most successful people are guarding that time. And it's truly about clarity on what you're working on, which is where I think a lot of people just sit down and they let their email and their slack dictate what they're working on for the day. And again, that's defense. You don't have the ball, you're not going to score, you're not going to win the game. If you're just constantly letting other people dictate where you're, where you're going, that's amazing.

It's like taking control of my day versus letting whatever inputs are coming in around dictate it. So I worked for a guy named Don Miller for a while and he basically said like, anybody who thinks they're going to get more than three things done in a day is just fooling themselves.

Yeah.

So it's like, what are the three things that you're gonna do today? And let's just focus on three things and it's like, great, we'll just create focus times for those and like move everything, everything else out.

So, and if you do three bigger things a day, that's 15 a week. Think about how much you actually get done in a week. By the time the week ends, you're like, okay, I maybe like, what did I do this week? Like, what did I actually move forward? But if you're focused, and I love the post it note thing because it's like, I don't need a long to do list overwhelmingly because again, we're protecting our brain. Even if you have a long to do list in front of you, you may say, I'm working on this thing, but just the sheer ability to see all of those things, your brain is now processing all of that information. And our brain can only process so much information at once. So I'm all about simplifying and saying, this is what I'm working on right now. Nothing else matters. And it's, it's so simple, but yet it's really powerful.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, talk to me about more about burnout here because I think this kind of focus, how does all of what we're talking about here, plus having huge ambition, plus like having family and you know, kids, sports games and birthdays and everything else going on, like, talk to me about like, is balance a real thing here? Are you trying to balance all this together? Is it intentionality or focus? Like, it's a lot of stuff happening in life and I think a lot of people get overwhelmed really quick. So talk to me about the mix of all this outside of work too.

So first, I think you have to understand what, where you're going with your life in this season and checking in to say what's important to you and what are your values in this season of life. And the word that I use, and I write about this in the book is intentional imbalance. There are going to be seasons of life that you are going to crank and push. You're working towards a big launch, you're working towards a big MRR goal. You're doing a lot and that's okay. It's going to be imbalanced. Where burnout happens is the lack of, of a check in at the end of that sprint. You just keep running the marathon and then moving the finish line. So I'm big on two things. I call it a spin cycle and I write about this in the book. A spin cycle in a washing machine. Is this intentional part of the cycle that alleviates the intensity, the heaviness from the water before you go into the dryer? Right. So for you, if you've been sprinting, you need a spin cycle. You need to come up and say, all right, that was really intense. There's a lot of heaviness in my life. Am I running the same spike cycle? Am I going to keep pushing towards this next goal? Do I need to come up for air for a week, two weeks, a month? So this idea of intentional rest and spin cycles, and I think many people, especially ambitious people, struggle with the word rest just because it feels like I'm, I'm slowing down, I don't need rest. Like, I'm good. And you may not at the surface level, but without these check ins, burnout is really tied to. Do you still feel connected to the work? Like, do you still feel like this is in line with who you are as a human? And are you giving yourself those intentional moments to say, all right, do I still feel good about what I'm working on? Does this still feel in alignment? Because I can tell you I've gone through seasons of life where I can sustain working hard for a pretty long time, as long as I keep checking in to say, yep, it's still in alignment, Yes, I know my non negotiables. And then the second piece is not only checking in with yourself, but really understanding. Like, is this. Do I have my non negotiables with my the rest of my life and throughout the whole, like when you're sprinting, I have at least three non negotiables. I must move my body, I must have dinner with my kids every night and I must have one date night a week. They're simple, but those are non negotiables. And so even when life is really, really intense and, and crazy, I keep those three because I know that those are three in. I believe burnout has caused this like, epidemic of more is more is more is more. Oh, you need more supplements, you need more red light. You need like a ten step routine to do this thing. And I wrote about this recently in my newsletter that self care and you know, anti burnout. It's actually like a matcha flavored new version of perfectionism when we. Everything should be about simplification and knowing what your non negotiables are in life. And if I can keep those three, then I, I know that I'm going to be okay. And I know when there's a spin cycle coming, I'll say one last thing. Most ambitious people struggle with celebrations, right? We're just like, launch something. Like, I'll share even. I still struggle with this. I am, I am an overachiever to a T. And I was telling my partner, I'm like, yeah, but like, writing a book isn't a big deal. Like, everybody writes a book. And he's like, no, you know a lot of people that write books because you hang out with a lot of authors. And he like googled the stat and it's like less than 1% of the world is an author and has written and published a book. And I was like, oh, right, got it. Okay. I need to celebrate this. And when you hang around other ambitious people, you just think that what you're doing every day, like, I'm from the Midwest. Like, most people don't still know what AI actually is and does. We are in a bubble. We're talking about how it's creating this system and this efficiency. We are so far ahead. We have to pause and celebrate, like our cognitive ability, like what we're doing, what we're building, who we're meeting, who we're like, there are people I'm talking to today that I would have only dreamt about meeting years ago. And that should be a moment to celebrate. So I think intentional rest and intentional celebration are in the non negotiables are the three kind of power pack for burnout. Prevention.

Yeah, I love that. I think the celebration is a big deal. I think remembering where you've come from is a big deal. I have a picture of the house that I was born in just to kind of like remind myself of, like, hey, like, you've actually come a long way because you fall into that trap often where it's like, oh, this is all normal. Okay, I've got to go to the next thing. I've got to go to the next thing. And one of my mentors had said something to me that burnout is actually, it's actually a incongruence between your internal world and your external world. And I think that's huge. It's like just remembering, like remembering that the place that I'm in is like 10 years ago I would be celebrating like the 10 year younger version of myself or the 15 year younger version of myself would be celebrating and doing back about where I'm at now. I think it's huge.

So I was just going to say that there's a small trick that I tell people in my coaching sessions. Literally just go into your email, type this time last year, look at what emails you sent this day last year, and you're going to be like, what? I was still learning about that or I was still trying to figure that thing out and you're literally going to be like blown away at where you were just a year ago. So that's a small little thing that you can do anytime you're like, oh, I'm so behind, I'm so behind. Let's reframe that inner narrative to say, I've come so far and I've got so much more in me to keep going, but I've come so far and I'm just getting started.

Yeah. A framework that I love here is zooming in and zooming out. So a lot of times when I feel people getting into this brand.